Collaborative 3D Visualization with CSpray

Abstract:

As networking technology brings us into the information age,
3D and multimedia applications become more prevalent and the emerging norm.
Improvements in communication infrastructure also allow us to
explore the realm of group interaction and collaboration over
the information superhighway.
Our work focuses on providing a small group of geographically
distributed scientists the means of sharing their data and
interactively creating visualizations and analyzing them.
This allows for shorter turn around time compared to more traditional means
which in turn allows for greater research productivity.
The key features of our system include:
different levels of information sharing,
incremental updates to reduce network traffic,
an intuitive floor control strategy
for coordinating access to shared resources,
a built in session manager to handle participants who
either join late or leave early,
and a host of collaborative 3D visualization aids.
An added feature is that while the system is designed for
small group collaborations, it can also be used for briefing
a larger audience.
These features are included in the CSpray
collaborative 3D visualization system.

Keywords:

Demos:

A three-way live demo of this work was conducted between
IEEE Visualization'94 in Washington, D.C.,
ACM Multimedia'94 in San Francisco, and
UCSC on October 19 and 20 1994.

Another live demo was conducted between UCSC and the
Supercomputing conference in San Diego on December 1995
with ATM switches.

Paper:

A postscript version of the paper to appear in the special
joint issue between IEEE Multimedia and IEEE Computer Graphics
and Applications on 3D and Multimedia on the Information Superhighway
to appear on March, 1997 can be obtained by clicking
here .
There are two sidebars that go with the paper.
One is on
spray , and the other is on the
cspray architecture .
These are also available via anonymous ftp from
ftp.cse.ucsc.edu,
get pub/reinas/papers/cga97*gz.